Saturday, October 25, 2008

Let's Have a Look at the Leadership Caucus Support

This list will give you an idea of what Stephane Dion was up against as he faced his caucus the day after the election. Also, you might notice that some of the pretenders that are "thinking of running" all supported a certain frontrunner. This is called "scaring the potential others" out of the leadership race (Coderre, Dhalla, McGuinty).

So, guys like McKenna and Manley look at lists like this and realize they start waaaaay behind the 8 ball and decide not to run. And, even if Stephane decided to fight a review and Gerard's guys backed him, it would be a knife fight in a dark alley. The only name I see as not a pretender right now is Domenic Leblanc. He was neutral last time, is young, bilingual and has deeeeeep connections in the corporate world.

22 comments:

Who I would love to see run for liberal leader is Chantal Hébert. Here you'd have it all a franco-ONTARIAN, a woman, very intelligent. She could help the federal Liberals set themselves apart from the current old-boys club in Ottawa.

Of course lets not forget he was also up against the fact that the party under its leadership received its worst share of the popular vote since 1867, the party lost a significant number of seats, and his personal popularity numbers were abyssmal.

In 1984, turner garnered a lousy 40 seat with 3,516,486. That year Mulroney won 50% of the vote. I'd have to say that was our worst year ever. Somehow though, Turner was allowed to run again.

Compare that to Dion's 77 seats and 3.6 million votes.

So, in 1988 he garnered yet another miserable result of only 83 seats and 4.2 million votes. Then the knives came out and game over.

History has shown the second run always gets a better result. Dion would have been no different. The only difference is that this caucus were going to ensure that they gave him a tough time going into a leadership review.

If you read my post I said the Liberals received the worst share of the popular vote since 1867 (Turner had 28%). There is a difference between Dion and Turner though I think. For Turner, some thought at the time that he didn't get a fair shot at winning in 1984 because of some of the decisions of the Trudeau government (including the patronage appointments that Mulroney infamously used in the debate).

Dion, by contrast, was not the leader who had to deal with the immediate aftermath of Sponsorship (Paul Martin was unfortunate enough to have that land on him, and his decisions about how to handle it were disastrous). He had two years to use his leadership to renew and mobilize the party and, deliver a clear message to voters that would motivate them to vote for the Liberal party once again. Now Mr. Dion complains about the tactics of the Conservatives and to some extent that's fair, but politics is an ugly business and the Liberals have certainly engaged strong personal attacks on Stephen Harper. Leaders have to be able to get past that and I think that ultimately, Dion's inability to communicate effectively in English severely limited his ability to overcome the expected character assassination.

One thing we do have to remember though is that personal attacks work best when people suspect an element of truth in them. It seems to me that the perceptions of Dion that people had were open enough to be receptive to the types of personal attacks made by the Conservatives. Unfortunate, but true in today's politics. While I certainly would embrace politics that was based upon principle, detailed academic arguments, and civilized discourse (I am a graduate student after all so I have considerable respect for the academic exercise), ultimately the reality of today's politics is that the leader has to be able to confidently counter character attacks that will be targeted to exploit people's preconceptions. Dion was unable to do this and if you read the Globe and Mail, he was fully informed it would happen and yet chose not to act immediately to counter a character assassination campaign. In some ways this political error was as bad as Paul Martin's decision to call a public inquiry into Sponsorship (as is quite rightly said in the programme Yes Minister, never call a public inquiry unless you already know exactly what it will find).

Mr. Dion had every opportunity to succeed and failed. He couldn't counter the attacks by the Conservatives (and no matter how unfair they might seem, the fairness is irrelevant, it's the response that matters), and his reputation for stubbornness was on display by his refusal to respond. He chose a poor campaign team that ran one of the worst Liberal campaigns I've ever seen, and he was unable to motivate people to get out to the polls. This is why he won't get a second shot. He had one fair shot and, to me, the results speak for themselves.

Here's the difference between Dion and Turner. 37 seats. Dion did much better than Turner even dreamed of, inspite of his Quebec MPs undermining him for the better part of 18 months and idiots like Liza Frulla bashing him accross the province...something Turner never had to face.

Turner didn't have to face the aftermath of a Chretien/martin Bloodbath followed with a Rae/Ignatieff power play either.

Not sure what party you're looking at, but it certainly isn't through the lens of objectivity.

btw If all of Stephane's people, including Kennedy's get behind Rae, as we should, since we know who refused to support the leader for 2 years and they should never be rewarded for that crap, it's about even. Just a thought.

I think LeBlanc is the future. Although, I see him running only to position himself for something big down the road. But I cant wait for these young guns tostart rising to the top. If there is one thing the LPC has going for it, it is talent. We just need someone now to rebuild the internal infrastructure of the party and raise some major money.

Scott, the Ignatieff people are absolutely trying to scare people in Quebec with Coderre. I've heard them. "If we don't elect Michael, Coderre will take over." It's classic and transparent. As I said last time, and for the last 2 years. The one saving grace is that the Ignatieff people have no subtlety. Everything they do is transparent.